How Much Can You Make as an Affiliate Marketer Online?

The Affiliate Industry: An Overview

I assume you know what online affiliate marketing is all about. If you don’t read about it on Wikipedia. What we want to find out with this blog post is this: Is Affiliate Marketing a Viable Business in 2016?

The Affiliate Marketing Industry will almost touch $7 Billion by 2020 | You can get the full WhitePaper here.

Ten percent industry growth is a very nice growth rate! Very few industries grow at 10% and if you are a smart affiliate marketer you can take a piece of this growing industry.

What to expect in annul income if you are an average online affiliate marketer?

The Annual Income of Affiliate Marketers. Over 50% of affiliates make under $1,666 per month | Source: the 2015 AffStat Affiliate Marketing Benchmarks Report (more than 2,350 affiliates were surveyed across the world)

Here are the metrics which are going to affect how fast and how much you will earn with affiliate marketing:

The industry you are in (e.g. health, wealth, dating, tech, food, fashion etc.)

The frequency at which you blog (once a week, twice a week, daily)

The quality and stickiness of your content (quick & dirty vs. well researched and in-depth)

Once you cross $3,000 you may think of leaving your day job (unless you have other income streams or you live in a country were living costs are low).

If we add the percentages of all the affiliates earning $40,000 a year and above we are talking about 21%, or one out of five affiliate marketers can afford to quite the 9-5 world and work from home (or anywhere with an Internet connection).

Affiliate Marketers: Examples

Let us look at some real bloggers out there making under 2k, 3k a month …and one who is crushing it six figures a year.

1. Earning up to 2k per Month

The Blog WhatMommyDoes.com made over $2,000 in January 2016 in pure affiliate income. To see the complete break up of the income and which products worked best click here.

2. Making 3k per month as an Affiliate

You can read a very detailed affiliate income report written by Mike Bradford here. He runs three Amazon Affiliate websites and the all put together make him over $3,000 in monthly revenue. One of the sites he hardly puts any work and he still get monthly recurring revenue.

3. Earning 6 Figures with Affiliate Marketing

You can check out the June 2016 income report of Just Another Girl and Her Blog. Abby made over 30k in one month (!) with here blog. Another guru in the affiliate marketing industry is Patt Flynn and you can listen to his income reports on his website at SmartPassiveIncome.com

What’s Your Hourly Earning Going to be?

You will have to get used with the fact, that the first few months your earnings per hour will be $0, zero, nada!

Only after working for some 200 hours you can expect to see some dollars rolling in and your earning per hour increase. (Consider three months of content writing and promotion until search engines pick up your site and you start ranking).

You could promote your site with Facebook Ads or Google / Bing Ads, but unless you have a product to sell with a decent margin you can’t justify your ads expenses.

Once you have your 15,000 visitors / month and make 1k in affiliate income and keep on working 100 hrs per month your hourly rate reaches 10$. The fun starts when your income starts to rise to 2k or 3k and you can start to afford to outsource certain tasks. Suddenly, your hourly income shoots up to $40 / $50 dollars.

And once you start to create and add your own digital products…well then the sky is the limit.

The Screw the 9-5 Movement

Many people want to screw their 9-5 job after getting their domain name registered.

My recommendation is to stick to your job until you cross the $2,000 / $3,000 per month mark (this may vary depending on your living costs and financial commitments). To reach 2-3k per month may take you 2-3 years or even 4-5.

But it’s worth to wait and at the same time you can make sure that your affiliate income comes from different sources so that in case one merchant stops paying you, you have others who can quickly replace the revenue loss.